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HELP: TFT Fujitsu-Siemens B17-3 (50Hz Amiga mode & eastereggs)

CyberyogiCoWindler

Posted 10 June 2013 - 08:27 PM

CyberyogiCoWindler

Junior

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91 posts

Joined 04-September 10

OS:98SE

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How can I permanently disable the "Frequency out of range" error popup in Amiga 50Hz mode?

The Fujitsu-Siemens Sceneview B17-3 is an office grade TFT monitor with 17 inch 4:3 pivot screen. Its IPS panel was not really designed for gaming (despite claimed 5ms speed). It has reasonable colour stability, but brightness changes with view angel. The white case with collapsible stand is fairly slim. Technically it seems to be a P17-x/P19-x/P21-x variant. As a convinced CRT user I bought this thing for emergency-use only (on a flea market for 4€).

menu buttons:

The menu behaviour is quite confusing. You reach it with the 'menu' button and can select the item with 'up' and 'down'. Press 'menu' again to step forward into any submenu. In these you can select options with 'up' and 'down', but here (and this is the only situation) you have to finally set it with 'exit' ('menu' does't work). In all other situations 'exit' just steps back out of a submenu or leaves the entire menu. IMO the 'exit' button should be better labelled 'left' and the 'menu' button 'right' to indicate their meaning.

eastereggs:

* (un)lock menu button

press 'power', release it and hold 'select' until the appearing timer bar finishes.

The worst flaw of this monitor is that it refuses vfreq < 55Hz with a popup nag window and blocked menu buttons, which prevents using it with Amiga (PAL mode with flickerfixer/ scandoubler). Instead of disappearing, after some seconds the window starts to travel around across the screen. This behaviour is extremely annoying since while with CRT monitors too low frequencies can indeed do harm (overheat flyback), with LCD screens it is completely safe (only looks a bit ugly by inferior scaling and pixel jitter) and in no way justifies such an annoyance. To temporary circumvent the nag popup, hold 'exit' + 'down' until the warranty void warning appears, then cancel it with 'exit'. You end up in the normal menu that you can exit now and everything works normal. Unfortunately any sync loss (e.g. Amiga reset) will make the popup nag screen reappear; I found no way to permanently disable this bugger. The monitor also sometimes turned itself off (only while in menu?); I am not sure if this was an overzealous protection circuit (against what???) or only bad signal from Amiga. :mad:

The Amiga NTSC (60Hz) mode runs without any nag screen, but makes very ugly vertical brightness gradients (fades dark to bright in stair steps). An Amiga (likely Atari ST too) can not be used without flickerfixer; the classic 25Hz or 30Hz interlace modes (plain PAL or NTSC video timing) cause only a black picture since these are way too far away from classic DOS textmode or VGA signals.

- Can I permanently disable the "Frequency out of range" nag popup?

I only found a service manual of an older model with similar functions, which mentions an RS232 port (buried inside?) for colour adjustment software similar like WinDAS. The hardware seems to be designed by AOC. There are interesting firmware flow charts but it does not tell how to define own modes.